Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) is a term used when one company makes a part or subsystem that is used in another company's end product. An aircraft OEM is typically required by aviation authorities (e.g., the Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA, of the United States) to verify that every single wire on an aircraft has been correctly installed and connected. Common wiring faults may include mis-wired ports, pushed pins, bent pins, and crossed wires (e.g., buses where high/low wires are crossed/swapped). Additional wiring faults that may occur in a network type connection may include incorrect installations of inserts into insert receptacles.
It is noted that the test procedures required to verify every wire on a completely assembled aircraft are very complex. Test procedures typically need to be designed to ensure that only the wire under test is active and that all other possible redundant paths have been disabled, usually by pulling the circuit breakers that power units that provide redundant data paths. It is also noted that troubleshooting wiring faults is very time consuming in a production environment when the aircraft has already been built and access to connectors is often very limited. In addition, certain regulations may prohibit any disturbance of the system during the verification process. In other words, all systems that have been disturbed during troubleshooting must then be retested prior to flight.
The complexities of the test procedures and the difficulties associated with carrying out these test procedures make testing of line-replaceable units or modules especially challenging. A line-replaceable unit (LRU), or a line-replaceable module (LRM), is a modular unit of an aircraft that is designed to be replaced quickly at an operating location. While it is required that each LRU be verified after installation to ensure that all wiring is correctly connected (e.g., without any mis-wired ports, pushed pins, bent pins, crossed wires, incorrect insertions and the like), currently available verification processes are only capable of detecting bus activities. This limited capability means that any bus connected to any port with any configuration of “high” and “low” wires will be verified as “good” under the currently available verification processes. Such verification processes are ineffective because they are only able to determine a mere presence of a bus, but are unable to determine the integrity of the connection provided by the bus. For instance, the presence of a bus having crossed wires may be detected and erroneously verified as “good” under the currently available verification processes.
Therein lies a need for systems and methods for automated verification of wiring without the aforementioned shortcomings.